Warning: Descriptions of a corpse ahead. Nothing overly graphic, really, but please look away if it will trigger you.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, pathologist, detective, or crime-analyst expert of any sort. I'm just kind of making this up as I go along (it's fiction, right?). My reasoning may not be entirely sound or 100% scientifically accurate, but it kind of makes sense and works with my story. So just go with it. :) Thank you!
Two: The Morgue
It is a credit to Molly Hooper that she no longer lost her nerve every time Sherlock Holmes burst into her morgue without warning (or invitation). Oh, she still found herself slightly tongue-tied around the eloquent and (sometimes) abrasive detective, but she also felt more confident knowing that she was one of the very few people that he trusted with his life (literally). His fall from the rooftop had been not good on several levels…but it had been something of a balm for her somewhat toxic relationship with him. He was just a man, after all.
So when the doors to autopsy flew open and the detective walked in with John in tow, Molly merely glanced up at the pair (after having put her heart back in her chest, because damn it all if that didn't startle her) and then back down to the corpse in her hands. She was wrist deep in a man's intestines… no time for niceties. And this particular corpse was one of the poor souls that had been taken by the car bombs that went off in London. There were whispers—very loud whispers—that it was an act of terrorism. No doubt that's why Sherlock and John were here now.
"You're here for the victims of the car bombings," Molly stated, frowning in concentration as she dislodged a hunk of shrapnel from the man's upper intestine with a pair of forceps. She plunked the metal into a stainless steel bowl at her side and then looked up to meet Sherlock's eyes. He nodded once, perfunctorily. Molly exhaled heavily and gestured to the man on the table with her chin.
"Henry Li, thirty-six years old, primary school teacher. He was on his way to work, rode his bicycle. He was cycling through a parking lot as a shortcut when the bomb detonated. He was right beside it."
She exhaled shakily before pulling her professional demeanour back into place. "Cause of death… well, pretty much everything you see before you. Third degree burns to 87 per cent of his body, massive blood loss from the shrapnel wounds, a fracture on his skull from where he impacted another car when the blast force threw him. I've only just started, but if I was a betting woman I'd say the head trauma is what killed him. The shrapnel wounds and the burns were just… extra."
Both John and Sherlock stepped closer to the body to peer at it. Sherlock heard John inhale in recognition and one look at the man's injuries made it clear as to why he did so. Li's body looked as if it had been chewed by the metal shrapnel of the car. The skin of his torso and his extremities was charred in many places and where the skin wasn't blackened it was a deep, meaty red. It was a sight John had seen many times during his tours in Afghanistan. It was not something you easily forgot.
"Jesus H Christ," John breathed. Sherlock turned to face the doctor, but John only had eyes for the victim on the table. John reached for a pair of gloves and snapped them on, looking to Molly for permission. She acquiesced with a nod of her head, her hands still occupied with rooting around in the man's insides for shrapnel pieces. John gently began to examine the man's outsides, prodding delicately at the burned and weeping flesh.
"What do you see?" Sherlock asked. Molly deposited another piece of shrapnel into the bowl with a metallic chink.
John's eyes roved over Li's body, and Sherlock saw amiable Dr John Watson leave his partner's eyes to be replaced by Captain John Watson, army doctor. "It's very similar to the victims we saw in Afghanistan," he said coolly, his voice detached and clinical. "The burns and the shrapnel wounds… it's all here. The only difference is that this man wasn't wearing army fatigues." John's lips pressed into a thin line of disapproval.
Sherlock snapped on his own pair of gloves and moved to Molly's side, picking up a few of the fragments from the bowl beside her. He studied them as where they lay in the palm of his hand, his aquamarine eyes narrowing in concentration as he looked at the shattered pieces of metal. Sherlock picked up a small petri dish from the counter and placed a few of the chips inside.
"Molly," he started. "I'm going to take these—'''
"Take them and go do whatever voodoo you do, Sherlock," Molly sang, cutting him off. He shot her an almost dumbfounded look, but she turned to him with a sad smile. "We've got a potential terrorist plot to uncover. I've got bodies to autopsy, John's got knowledge to divulge for me, and you've got shrapnel to examine. Not a moment to lose."
Sherlock leaned over and kissed Molly's cheek with enthusiasm, which caused the pathologist to blush cherry red and clear her throat before swatting at the detective with her elbows to get him out of her space. Sherlock snapped his gloves off and tossed them in the bin, grabbing the petri dish full of shrapnel on his way out the door. John took his gloves off as well and then discarded his coat, trading it for one of the scrub jackets lying folded on a tray. He put a fresh pair of gloves on and stepped back to Henry Li's body, continuing his scan from where he left off. He poked and prodded around the man's outsides while Molly continued to pull hunks of metal from the man's insides. They worked for some number of minutes in contemplative silence before Molly spoke.
"Is this what war is like, John?" she asked, her voice shy in the quiet space, but her question firm.
John exhaled slowly as he stared at the body in front of him, his eyes glazed over as his mind took him thousands of miles across oceans and mountains and deserts, back to the hot plains of Afghanistan. Images flashed in front of him—the flash of rifle fire in the dead of night, the squawk of radios, the cries of the wounded, the echoes of mortar fire from the distant hills, the laughter from the lads in their tents… it all seemed so far away from him and yet so close at the same time. The corpse that lay in front of him was yet another one of the many faceless men and women that they had buried under the shifting sands, some of them metaphorically and some of them literally. The soldiers got to go home to England and rest there…what was left of them, anyway.
But the civilians… the Afghani innocents caught in the middle of war that ravaged their lands and threatened their lives…they were buried in the sand under the watchful eyes of their relatives. They were called collateral damage. It was an awfully heartless term for something that had so much life. To John and the rest of his company, the natives were never collateral damage…they were neighbours. And they buried them with as much solemnity as they did one of their own. John looked up and down Henry Li's body and then over Molly's shoulder to the two other black bags on the tables behind her. Now the collateral damage was being metred here, at home. Innocent English citizens were being blown to bits without discrimination and damned if that didn't ignite a spark deep in John's chest. Some days it was easy to forget the war itself, especially since he spent his time chasing criminals around London with Sherlock. The act provided the adrenaline rush and the sparks of danger that he missed from the war. Helping Sherlock and Lestrade… it provided all the adrenaline of the chase without the lasting damage (usually). The memories of broken and burned bodies ripped to shreds by bullets and mortars slipped into the back of his mind and stayed there, almost like a dream; a nightmare long passed. But now the memories of war had landed solidly on his doorstep, a great ugly vulture bringing back the terror he thought he'd buried long ago.
And it was awfully real.
"No, Molly," John answered at long last. "War is much uglier than this, I assure you."
Molly reached forward and gently nudged John's hand with her wrist, flashing him a small smile as their eyes met. John returned the smile and then turned his attention back to the body.
"So," he said. "Have you found anything that might give us a clue as to who did this or…any kind of specifics about the attacks themselves?"
Molly frowned as she plucked another hunk of metal from a tear in Li's pancreas. "Well, doctor, I was rather hoping you would be able to provide some of that information. I mean… the man looks like he's swallowed a blender."
John furrowed his brow in concentration and then poked his hand into the man's insides, digging around the shredded organic material. "Well, I have to say that these internal injuries are a hell of a lot… cleaner than the wounds I saw in Afghanistan."
"You mean less dirt and things?" Molly asked.
"Well, yes… but what I meant was that the perforation and the lacerations are all smooth cuts. See around these bits here," John pointed at some neat slashes in the liver. "The wounds we got used to seeing in Afghanistan were always ragged and torn around the edges. A lot of the bombs we encountered were…homemade with whatever they could scrap together. They did more damage that way, and as you said, the wounds were always dirtier from the rusted pipes and things they used to build them. But these wounds… they're clean and neat…comparatively, anyway."
"What do you think that means, John?" Molly queried. She pulled a sliver of silver metal from Li's body and held it up between them. John took it from her and examined it in his gloved fingers.
"It means, Molly, that whoever set off these car bombs… they had access to better materials and probably had more training in putting them together. I don't think these were slapdash jobs put together by some homegrown terrorist operation."
John fixed Molly with a penetrative gaze. "I think this was done by professionals."
A/N: My Wiki research indicates that technical term for the pieces of a detonated bomb, grenade, or artillery shell is fragmentation (or frag, for short), with "splinters" or "shards" being used to describe the preformed parts. Shrapnel is actually in reference to the shrapnel shell, which is a shell casing that's filled with steel or lead balls suspended in resin. When the shell is fired, an explosive charge at the base of the shell fractures the resin matrix and releases the balls, which still retain their velocity from the initial firing sequence. The term "shrapnel" is mistakenly used to refer to fragmentation from the aforementioned explosive devices, especially by non-military media sources. I'm using the term shrapnel because… everyone knows what that means, even though we're technically wrong.
The more you know! (Thank you Wikipedia!)
Also... John's musings about war, death, Afghani civilians, etc... that's all me, folks. Not trying to make any sort of political statements or anything of the sort. This is just my interpretation of our former army doctor's mind.